mere means.
The obligation to respect the autonomy of persons sets a minimum but absolute requirement for the free consent of sexual partners. This means, of course, that rape, violence, or any harmful use of power against unwilling victims is never justified; and seduction or manipulation of persons who have limited capacity for choice because of immaturity, special dependency, or loss of ordinary personal power, is ruled out. It also means that other general ethical principles such as the principles of truth-telling, promise-keeping, and respect for privacy are fundamental to an adequate sexual justice ethic. Whatever other rationales can be given for these principles, their violation binders the freedom of choice of the other person. Individuals do not just survive or thrive in relation to others; they cannot exist without some form of fundamental relatedness to personal others. In relation, awareness of autonomy is born, and freedom either grows or is diminished. Insofar as sexuality qualifies the whole personality of persons, it also qualifies the relation of persons to one another. Sexual activity and sexual pleasure are instruments and modes of relation; they can enhance relation or hinder it, contribute to it and express it. Sexual activity and sexual pleasure are optional goods for human persons (in the sense that they are not absolute, peremptory goods which could never be subordinated to other goods or for the sake of other goods be let go), but they can be very great goods, mediating relationality and the general wellbeing of persons. Sex must not violate relationality but serve it. Another way of saying this is that it is not enough to respect the free choice of sexual partners. Respect for persons together in sexual activity requires mutuality of participation. This, of course, can be expressed in many ways, but it entails activity and receptivity on the part of both persons?mutuality of desire, of action, and of response. Underlying mutuality is a view of sexual desire which does not see it as a search only for the pleasure to be found in the relief of libidinal tension, although it may include this. Human sexuality, rather, is fundamentally relational; sexual desire ul-
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timately seeks what contemporary philosophers have called a "double reciprocal incarnation," or "mutuality of desire and embodied union." This leads to yet another norm, however. Freedom and mutuality are not sufficient to respect persons in sexual relations. A condition for real freedom and a necessary qualification of mutuality is equality. The equality which is at stake here is equality of power. Inequities in social and economic status, age and maturity, professional identity, etc., render sexual relations inappropriate and unethical primarily because they entail power inequities?hence, unequal vulnerability, dependency, and limitation of options. Strong arguments can be made for a third norm regarding relation-
feared that sexual desire would be great; in the present the rise in impotency and sexual boredom makes persons more likely to fear that sexual desire will be too little. There is growing general evidence that sex is neither the indomitable drive that early Christians thought it was nor the primordial impulse of early psychoanalytic theory. When it was culturally repressed, it seemed an inexhaustible power, underlying other motivations, always struggling to express itself in one way or another. Now that it is less repressed, more and more free and in the open, it is easier to see other complex motivations behind it, and to recognize its inability in and of itself to satisfy the affective yearning of persons. More and more too
Just as homosexual men and lesbian women
affirm one another and themselves in terms of autonomy and relationality, so they have claims to respect from the wider society and must
the Christian churches.
ality in a Christian sexual ethic. At the heart of the Christian community's understanding of the place of sexuality in human and Christian life has been the notion that some form of commitment, some form of covenant, must characterize relations that include a sexual dimension. In the past, this commitment, of course, was identified with heterosexual marriage. It was tied to the need for a procreative order and a discipline for unruly sex. Even when it was valued in itself as a realization of the life of the church in relation to Jesus Christ it carried what today are unwanted connotations of inequality in relation between
men and women. It is
possible, nonetheless, that when all the meanings of commitment for sexual relations are sifted, we are left with powerful reasons to retain it as an ethical norm. Sexual desire left to itself does not even seem able to sustain its own ardor. In the past, persons
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readily comes the conclusion that sexual desire without interpersonal love leads to disappointment and a growing meaninglessness. The other side of this conclusion is that sexuality is an expression of something beyond itself. Its power is a power for union and its desire a desire for intimacy. Sobering evidence of the inability of persons to blend their lives together, and weariness with the high rhetoric that has traditionally surrounded human covenants, yield a contemporary reluctance to evaluate the two ways of living sexual union. At the very least it may be said, however, that while brief encounters open a lover to relation, they cannot mediate the kind of union?of knowing and being known, loving and being loved?for which human relationality offers the potential. Moreover, the pursuit of multiple relations precisely for the sake of sustaining sexual desire risks violating the norms of autonomy and mu-
tuality, risks measuring others as apt to our own ends, risks inner disconnection from any kind of lifeprocess of our own or in relation with others. Discrete moments of union are not necessarily valueless, but they serve to isolate us from others and from ourselves. On the other hand, there is reason to believe that sexuality can be the object of commitment, that sexual desire can be incorporated into a covenanted love, without distortion and loss. Given all the caution learned from contemporary experience, we may still hope that our freedom is sufficiently powerful to gather up our love and give it a future; that thereby our sexual desire can be nurtured into a tenderness that has not forgotten passion. We may still believe that to try to use our freedom in this way is to be faithful to the love that arises in us or even the yearning that rises from us. A Christian sexual ethic, then, may well identify commitment as a norm for sexual relations and activity. Given a concern for the wholeness of the human person, and for a way of living that is conducive to the means
integration of all of life's important
for the fulfillment of sexual desire in the highest forms of friendship, the norm must be a committed love. This, of course, raises special problems in an ethic for homosexual love?problems to which I will return. While the traditional procreative norm of sexual relations and activity no longer holds absolute sway in Christian sexual ethics, there remains a special concern for responsible reproduction of the human species. Traditional arguments that if there is sex, it must be procreative have changed to arguments that if sex is procreative it must be within a context that assures responsible care of offspring. These concerns appear at first glance to have little to do with a sexual ethic for same-sex relations. Yet they suggest an important last norm for homosexuals as for heterosexuals in regard to relationality. Interpersonal love, in so far as it is just, must be fruitful. That is to say, it violates relationality if it closes in upon itself and refuses to open to a wider community of persons. The articulation of this norm, however, moves us to another peraspects, and